Bernard Williams

Bernard Williams (1929–2003) was a leading influence in
philosophical ethics in the latter half of the twentieth century. He
rejected the codification of ethics into moral theories that views
such as Kantianism and (above all) utilitarianism see as essential to
philosophical thinking about ethics, arguing that our ethical life is
too untidy to be captured by any systematic moral theory. He was also
an important contributor to debates on moral psychology, personal
identity, equality, morality and the emotions, and the interpretation
of philosophers including Wittgenstein, Nietzsche, Descartes,
Aristotle, and Plato.

Williams’ contributions were grounded in two overriding
commitments. First, he was deeply impressed by the importance of
subjective integrity or authenticity, and much of his work is
essentially a sustained attempt to make sense of how moral theorizing
can avoid alienating individuals from their deepest values, cares and
life-projects. Second, this sustained attempt was made under the
umbrella of a variety of philosophical naturalism which was both
anti-Platonic and anti-reductionist. He expressed these twin
commitments late in his life when he dreamed, wistfully, of “a
philosophy that would be thoroughly truthful and honestly
helpful” (2005: 212).

In what follows, we trace Williams’ personal and philosophical
development, beginning with a biographical summary and proceeding to a
discussion of his most important ideas.

1. Biography

Bernard Williams was born in Essex in 1929, and educated at Chigwell
School and Balliol College, Oxford, where he read Greats, the uniquely
Oxonian degree that begins with Homer and Vergil and concludes with
Thucydides, Tacitus, and (surprisingly perhaps) the latest in
contemporary philosophy. Both Williams’ subject of study and his
tutors, especially Richard Hare, remained as influences throughout his
life: the Greeks’ sort of approach to philosophy never ceased to
attract him, Hare’s sort of approach never ceased to have the
opposite effect. (Williams’ contemporaries at Balliol, John
Lucas for example, still report their mischievous use of
“combined tactics” in philosophy tutorials with Hare; or
perhaps the relevant preposition is “against”.)

Early in his career, Williams sat on a number of British government
committees and commissions, most famously chairing the Committee on
Obscenity and Censorship of 1979, which applied Mill’s
“harm principle” to the topic, concluding that
restrictions were out of place where no harm could reasonably be
thought to be done, and that by and large society has other problems
which are more worth worrying about. At this time, he also began to
publish books. His first book, Morality: an introduction to
ethics (1972), already announced many of the themes that were to
be central to his work. Already evident, in particular, were his
questioning attitude to the whole enterprise of moral theory, his
caution about the notion of absolute truth in ethics, and his
hostility to utilitarianism and other moral theories that seek to
systematise moral life and experience on the basis of such an
absolute; as he later put it, “There cannot be any very
interesting, tidy or self-contained theory of what morality is…
nor… can there be an ethical theory, in the sense of a
philosophical structure which, together with some degree of empirical
fact, will yield a decision procedure for moral reasoning”
(1981: ix-x). His second book, Problems of the Self (= PS;
1973), was a collection of his philosophical papers from 1956 to 1972;
his further collections of essays (Moral Luck, 1981, and
Making Sense of Humanity, 1998) were as much landmarks in the
literature as this first collection. (Posthumously three further
collections appeared: In the Beginning was the Deed (ed.
Geoffrey Hawthorn), 2005, A Sense of the Past, 2005, and
Philosophy as a Humanistic Discipline (2006); at least the
second and third of these three collections are already having a
considerable impact on philosophy, partly because they include essays
that were already well-known and widely discussed in their original
places of appearance.) In 1973 Williams also brought out a co-authored
volume, Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J.J.C.Smart (=
UFA); his contribution to this (the Against bit) being, in
the present writer’s view, a tour de force of
philosophical demolition. Then in 1978 Williams produced
Descartes: The Project of Pure Enquiry. This study could be
described as his most substantial work outside ethics, but for the
fact that the key theme of the book is the impossibility of
Descartes’ ambition to give a foundation, in the first-personal
perspective, to the “absolute conception” of the world, a
representation of the world “as it is anyway” that
includes, explains, and rationally interrelates all other possible
representations of the world (Williams 1968: 65)—a theme that is
in an important sense not outside ethics at all.

Williams
worked in Britain until 1987, when he left
for Berkeley in protest at the impact of the Thatcher
government’s policies on British universities. These policies
had not stopped him from publishing, in 1985, the book that offers the
most unified and sustained presentation of what Williams had to say
about ethics and human life: Ethics and the Limits of
Philosophy. On his return to Britain in 1990 (incidentally the
year of Mrs. Thatcher’s resignation) he succeeded his old tutor
Richard Hare as White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy at Oxford.
While in the Oxford chair he produced Shame and Necessity
(1993), a major study of Greek ethics which aims to distinguish what
we think about ethics “from what we think that we think”
(1993: 91): Williams’ thesis is that our deepest convictions are
often more like classical Greek ethical thought, and less like the
post-Enlightenment “morality system”, as Williams came to
call it, than most of us have yet realised. (More about the morality
system in sections 2 and 3.)

In 1999 he published an introductory book on Plato
(Routledge). After 1999—when he was knighted—he began to
be affected by the cancer which eventually killed him, but was still
able to bring out Truth and Truthfulness in 2002. In this
Williams argues, against such deniers of the possibility or importance
of objective truth as the pragmatist Richard Rorty and the
deconstructionist Jacques Derrida, that it is indispensable to any
human society to accept both truth and truthfulness as values, and
sincerity and accuracy as corresponding virtues. Nor need such beliefs
imply anything disreputably “metaphysical”, in the
Nietzschean sense that they lead us into a covert worship of what
Williams takes to be the will o’ the wisps of theism or
Platonism. On the contrary, Williams argues, Nietzsche is on his side,
not the deniers’, because Nietzsche himself believes that, while
a vindicatory history of the notions of truth and truthfulness
certainly has to be a naturalistic one, that is not to say that such a
history is impossible. We can write this history if we can supply a
“potential explanation”, to use Robert Nozick’s term
(Nozick 1974: 7–9), of how these notions could have arisen.
Williams himself attempts to provide such a potential explanation,
which if plausible will—given the impossibility of recovering
the actual history—provide us with as much insight as we can
reasonably hope for into how the notions of truth and truthfulness did
in fact arise. Such an understanding of truth and truthfulness,
Williams concludes, cannot lead us back into the pre-modern
philosophical Edens where truth and truthfulness are taken to have
their origin in something entirely transcendent, such as Plato’s
Forms, or God, or the cognitive powers of the Kantian subject; but it
can lead us to the less elevated and more realistic hope that truth,
as a human institution, will continue to sustain the virtues of truth
“in something like the more courageous, intransigent, and
socially effective forms that they have acquired over their
history… and that the ways in which future people will come to
make sense of things will enable them to see the truth and not be
broken by it” (2002: 269).

Some of Williams’ critics have complained that his work is
largely “destructive” or “negative”. Part of
Williams’ reply is that his nuanced and particularistic approach
to ethics—via the detail of ethical questions—is
negative only from the point of view of those operating under a
completely undefended assumption. This is the assumption that, if
there is to be serious ethical thought, then it must inevitably take
the form of moral theory. The impression that any other approach could
not be more than “negative” is itself part of the mindset
that he is attacking.

Williams often also meets the charge of negativity with a
counter-offensive, which can be summarised as the retort that
there’s plenty to be negative about (1995: 217). “Often,
some theory has been under criticism, and the more particular material
[e.g. Williams’ famous examples (UFA: 93–100) of George
and Jim: see section 4 below] has come in to remind one of the
unreality and, worse, distorting quality of the theory. The
material… is itself extremely schematic, but… it at
least brings out the basic point that… the theory is frivolous,
in not allowing for anyone’s experience, including the
author’s own. Alternatively, the theory does represent
experience, but an impoverished experience, which it holds up as the
rational norm—that is to say, the theory is stupid.”

Since one of Williams’ main objectives is to demonstrate the
frivolity and/ or stupidity of too much contemporary moral theory, it
is natural to structure our more detailed examination of his
contributions to philosophy by beginning with its critical side. The
first two of the three themes from Williams that we pick for closer
attention are both campaigns of argument against positions:
respectively, against the “morality system” (sections 2 and 3),
and against utilitarianism (section 4). The aptness of this
arrangement comes out in the fact that, as we shall see, most of the
constructive positions that Williams adopts can be seen as the
“morals” of these essentially destructive stories. Even
what we take to be Williams’ single most important positive
thesis, a view about the nature of motivation and reasons for action,
emerges from his critique of other people’s views about reasons
for action; more about that, his famous “internal reasons”
argument, in section 5.

2. Williams and Moral Philosophy

In the Preface to Williams’ first book he notes the charge
against contemporary moral philosophy “that it is peculiarly
empty and boring”.
[1].
Moral philosophy, he claims, has found an original way of being
boring: and this is “by not discussing moral issues at
all.”

Certainly, this charge is no longer as fair now as it was in 1972.
Today there is an entire discipline called “applied” or
“practical” ethics, not to mention sub-disciplines called
environmental, business, sport, media, healthcare, and medical ethics,
to the extent that hardly any moral issues are not discussed
by philosophers nowadays. However, while some or even many
philosophers today do applied ethics by applying some general,
abstract theory, a problem with many of them, as Williams pointed out
in an interview in 1983, is that those who proceed in this way often
seem to lose any real interest in the perspectives of the human beings
who must actually live with a moral problem:

I do think it is perfectly proper for some philosophers all of the
time and for other philosophers some of the time to be engaged in
technical issues, without having to worry all the time whether their
work is going to revolutionise our view of the employment situation,
or something of that kind. Indeed, without criticising any particular
thinkers or publicists, a problem with “applied ethics” is
that some people have a bit of ready-made philosophical theory, and
they whiz in, a bit like hospital auxiliary personnel who aren’t
actually doctors. That kind of applied philosophy isn’t even
half-interesting…[2]

He continues:

…the temptation is to find a way to apply philosophy to
immediate and practical problems and to do so by arguing about those
problems in a legalistic way. You are tempted to make your moral
philosophy course into a quasi-legal course… All the
philosophical journals are full of issues about women’s rights,
abortion, social justice, and so on. But an awful lot of it consists
of what can be called in the purely technical sense a kind of
casuistry, an application of certain moral systems or principles or
theories to discussing what we should think about abortion.

We are now able to see how Williams’ conceived of the relation
between philosophy and lived ethical experience. He firmly believed
that philosophy should speak to that experience, on pain of
being “empty and boring”. But he did not think that we
should follow the moral philosophers of his day in preferring the
schematic over the detailed, or the general over the particular. Here,
Williams joins a long critical tradition that stretches at least back
to G.W.F. Hegel, whose own claim that Kant’s moral theory was
"empty" is importantly related to Williams’ own charge against
moral theorizing. Moreover, as a general criticism of moral
philosophy, this point arguably remains quite correct even
today.[3]
Bearing this general orientation in mind, we now turn to a discussion
of Williams’ more determinate charges against various types of
moral theory.

3. Against the “peculiar institution”

The unwillingness to be drawn into discussing particular ethical
issues that Williams complains of was a reflection of earlier
developments. In particular, it was a reflection of the logical
positivists’ disdain for “moralising”, a disdain
which arose naturally from the emotivist conviction of philosophers
such as A.J.Ayer that to utter one’s first-order moral beliefs
was to say nothing capable of truth or falsehood, but simply to
express one’s attitudes, and hence not a properly
philosophical activity at all. More properly philosophical,
on emotivist and similar views, was a research-programme that became
absolutely dominant during the 1950s and 1960s in Anglophone
philosophy, including moral philosophy. This was linguistic analysis
in the post-Wittgensteinian style of J.L.Austin, who hoped, starting
from an examination of the way we talk (whoever “we” may
be: more on that in a minute), to reveal the deep structure of a wide
variety of philosophically interesting phenomena: among the most
successful applications of Austin’s method were his studies of
intention, other minds, and responsibility.

When Ayer’s dislike of preaching and Austin’s method of
linguistic analysis were combined in moral philosophy, one notable
result[4]
was Richard Hare’s “universal presciptivism”, a
moral system which claimed to derive the form of all first-order moral
utterances simply from linguistic analysis of the two little words
“ought” and “good”. Hare argued that it
followed from the logic of these terms, when used in their full or
specially moral sense, that moral utterances were (1) distinct from
other utterances in being, not assertions about how the world is, but
prescriptions about how we think it ought to be; and (2) distinct from
other prescriptions in being universalisable, by which Hare
meant that anyone who was willing to make such a prescription about
any agent, e.g. himself, should be equally willing to make it about
any other similarly-placed agent. In this way Hare’s theory
preserved the important emotivist thesis that a person’s moral
commitments are not rationally challengeable for their content, but
only for their coherence with that person’s other moral
commitments—and thus tended to keep philosophical attention away
from questions about the content of such
commitments.[5]
At the same time, his system was also able to accommodate a central
part of the Kantian outlook, because it gave a
rationale[6]
for the twin views that moral commitments are overriding as
motivations (so that they will motivate if present), and that
they are overriding as rational justifications (so that they
rationally must motivate if they are present). Hence cases
like akrasia, where a moral commitment appears to be present
in an agent but gets overridden by something else along the way to
action, must on Hare’s view be cases where something has gone
wrong: either the agent is irrational, or else she has not really
uttered a full-blown moral ought, a properly moral
commitment, either because (1) the prescription that she claims to
accept is not really one that she accepts at all, or (2) because
although she does sincerely accept this prescription, she is not
prepared to give it a fully universalised form, and hence does not
accept it as a distinctively moral prescription.

In assessing a position like Hare’s, Williams and other critics
often begin with the formidable difficulties involved in the project
of deducing anything much about the structure of morality from the
logic of moral language: see e.g., Geach, “Good and Evil”,
Analysis 1956, and Williams 1972: 52–61. These
difficulties are especially acute when the moral language we consider
is basically just the words “ought” and “good”
and their opposites. “If there is to be attention to language,
then there should be attention to more of it” (Williams 1985:
127); the closest Williams comes to inheriting the ambitions of
linguistic analysis is his defence of the notion of morally
“thick concepts” (1985:
140–143)[7].
These—Williams gives coward, lie, brutality and
gratitude as examples—are concepts that sustain an
ethical load of a culturally-conditioned form, and hence succeed both
in being action-guiding (for members of that culture), and in making
available (to members of that culture) something that can reasonably
be described as ethical knowledge. Given that my society has
arrived at the concept of brutality, that is to say has got clear, at
least implicitly, about the circumstances under which it is or is not
applicable, there can be facts about brutality (hence,
ethical facts) and also justified true
beliefs[8]
about brutality (hence, ethical knowledge). Moreover, this knowledge
can be lost, and will be lost, if the concept and its social context
is lost. (For a strikingly similar philosophical project to that
suggested by this talk of thick concepts, cp. Anscombe 1958a, and
Philippa Foot’s papers “Moral Beliefs” and
“Moral Arguments”, both in her Virtues and
Vices.)

Before we even get to the problem how the structure of morality is
supposed to follow from moral language, there is the prior question
“Whose moral language?”; and this is a deeper
question. We do not suppose that all moral language (not even—to
gesture towards an obviously enormous difficulty—all moral
language inEnglish) has always and everywhere had
exactly the same presuppositions, social context, or cultural
significance. So why we should suppose that moral language has always
and everywhere had exactly the same meaning, and has always been
equally amenable to the analysis of its logical structure offered by
Hare? (Or by anyone else: it can hardly be insignificant that when
G.E.Moore (Principia Ethica sections 17, 89) anticipated Hare by
offering a linguistic analysis of “good”, his analysis of
this term was on the face of it quite different from Hare’s,
despite Moore’s extreme historical and cultural proximity to
Hare.) Basing moral objectivism on the foundations of a linguistic
approach leaves it more vulnerable to relativistic worries than other
foundations do. For on the linguistic approach, we also face a
question of authority, the question why, even if something like the
offered analysis of our moral language were correct, that should
license us to think that the moral language of our society
has any kind of universal jurisdiction over any
society’s. In its turn, this question is very apt to breed the
further question how, if our moral language lacks this universal
jurisdiction over other societies, it can make good its claim to
jurisdiction even in our society.

These latter points about authority are central to Williams’
critique of contemporary moral philosophy. Like Anscombe before him,
Williams argues that the analysts’ tight focus on such words as
“ought”, “right”, and “good” has
come, in moral theory, to give those words (when used in their alleged
“special moral sense”) an air of authority which they
could only earn against a moral and religious backdrop—roughly,
the Christian world-view—that is nowadays largely missing. What
Williams takes to be the correct verdict on modern moral theory is
therefore rather like Nietzsche’s on George
Eliot:[9]
the idea that morality can and will go on just as before in the
absence of religious belief is simply an illusion that reflects a lack
of “historical sense”. As
Anscombe[10]
puts it (1958: 30), “it is not possible to have a [coherent law
conception of ethics] unless you believe in God as a law-giver…
It is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when
criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and
forgotten.” And as Williams puts it (1985: 38), the
“various features of the moral judgement system support each
other, and collectively they are modelled on the prerogatives of a
Pelagian God.”

What then are these features? That is a big question, because Williams
spent pretty well his whole career describing and criticising them.
But he gives his most straightforward, and perhaps the definitive,
summary of what the “morality system” comes to in the last
chapter of Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy. (The
chapter’s title provocatively describes morality as “the
peculiar institution”, this phrase being the American
Confederacy’s standard euphemism for
slavery.[11])

Following this account, we may venture to summarise the
“morality system” in nine leading
theses.[12]First, the morality system is essentially practical:
my moral obligations are always things that I can do, so that
“if my deliberation issues in something that I cannot do, then I
must deliberate again” (1985: 175). This implies,
second, that moral obligations cannot (really)
conflict (185: 176). Third, the system includes a
pressure towards generalisation which Williams calls “the
obligation out-obligation in principle”: this is the
view that every particular moral obligation needs the logical backing
of a general moral obligation, of which it is to be explained as an
instance. Fourth, “moral obligation is
inescapable” (185: 177): “the fact that a given agent
would prefer not to be in [the morality] system will not excuse
him”, because moral considerations are, in some sense like the
senses sharpened up by Kant and by Hare, overriding
considerations. In any deliberative contest between a moral obligation
and some other consideration, the moral obligation will always win
out, according to the morality system. The only thing that
can trump an obligation is another obligation (1985: 180);
this is a fifth thesis of the morality system, and it
creates pressure towards a sixth, that as many as
possible of the considerations that we find practically important
should be represented as moral obligations, and that considerations
that cannot take the form of obligations cannot really be important
after all (1985: 179). Seventh, there is a view about
the impossibility of “moral luck” that we might call, as
Williams calls it, the “purity of morality” (1985:
195–6): “morality makes people think that, without its
very special obligation, there is only inclination; without its utter
voluntariness, there is only force; without its ultimately pure
justice, there is no justice”; whereas “in truth”,
Williams insists, “almost all worthwhile human life lies between
the extremes that morality puts before us” (1985: 194).
Eighth, “blame is the characteristic reaction
of the morality system” to a failure to meet one of its
obligations (1985: 177); and “blame of anyone is directed to the
voluntary” (1985: 178). Ninth, and finally, the
morality system is impersonal. We shall set this last feature of the
system aside until section 4, and focus, for now, on the other
eight.

For each of the theses, Williams has something (at least one thing) of
deep interest to say about why we should reject it. The
first and second—about the
practicality of morality and the impossibility of real
conflict—are his target in his well-known early paper
“Ethical Consistency” (PS: 166–186). In real life,
Williams argues, there surely are cases where we find ourselves under
ethical demands which conflict. These conflicts are not always
eliminable in the way that the morality system requires them always to
be—by arguments leading to the conclusion that one of the
oughts was only prima facie (in Ross’s
terminology: see Williams 1985: 176–177), or pro tanto
(in a more recent terminology: see Kagan 1989), or in some other way
eliminable from our moral accounting. But, Williams argues, “it
is surely falsifying of moral
thought[13]
to represent its logic as demanding that in a conflict… one of
the conflicting oughts must be totally rejected [on the
grounds that] it did not actually apply” (PS:
183–4).[14]
For the fact that it did actually apply is registered by all sorts of
facts in our moral experience, including the very important phenomenon
of ineliminable agent-regret, regret not just that something happened,
but that it was me who made it happen (1981: 27–30).

Suppose for
example[15]
that I, an officer of a wrecked ship, take the hard decision to
actively prevent further castaways from climbing onto my already
dangerously overcrowded lifeboat. Afterwards, I am tormented when I
remember how I smashed the spare oar repeatedly over the heads and
hands of desperate, drowning people. Yet what I did certainly brought
it about that as many people as possible were saved from the
shipwreck, so that a utilitarian would say that I brought about the
best consequences, and anyone might agree that I found the only
practicable way of avoiding a dramatically worse outcome. Moreover, as
a Kantian might point out, there was nothing unfair or
malicious about what I did in using the minimum force
necessary to repel further boarders: my aim, since I could not save
every life, was to save those who by no choice of mine just happened
to be in the lifeboat already; this was an aim that I properly had,
given my role as a ship’s officer; and it was absolutely not my
intention to kill or (perhaps) even to injure anyone.

So what will typical advocates of the morality system have to say to
me afterwards about my dreadful sense of
regret?[16]
If they are—as perhaps they had better not be—totally
consistent and totally honest with me, what they will have to say is
simply “Don’t give it a second thought; you did what
morality required, so your deep anguish about it is irrational.”
And that, surely, cannot be the right thing for anyone to say. My
anguish is not irrational but entirely justified. Moreover, it is
justified simply as an ex post facto response to what I did:
it does not for instance depend for its propriety upon the
suggestion—a characteristic one, for many modern moral
theorists—that there is prospective value for the future in my
being the kind of person who will have such reactions.

The third thesis Williams mentions as a part of the
morality system is the obligation out-obligation in
principle, the view that every particular moral obligation needs the
backing of a general moral obligation, of which it is to be explained
as an instance. Williams argues that this thesis will typically engage
the deliberating agent in commitments that he should not have. For one
thing, the principle commits the agent to an implausibly demanding
view of morality (1985: 181–182):

The immediate claim on me, “In this emergency, I am under an
obligation to help”, is thought to come from, “One is
under this general obligation: to help in an emergency”…
But once the journey into more general obligations has started, we may
begin to get into trouble—not just philosophical trouble, but
conscience trouble—with finding room for morally indifferent
actions… if we have accepted general and indeterminate
obligations to further various moral objectives… they will be
waiting to provide work for idle hands, and the thought can gain a
footing that… I am under an obligation not to waste time in
doing things that I am under no obligation to do. At this stage,
certainly, only an obligation can beat an obligation [cp. the
fourth thesis], and in order to do what I wanted to
do, I shall need one of those fraudulent items, a duty to myself.

It is only the pressure to systematise that leads us to infer that, if
it is X’s particular obligation in S to φ,
then this must be because there is a general obligation, on any
X-like agent, to φ in any S-like
situation.[17]
Unless some systematic account of morality is true—as Williams
of course denies—there is no obvious reason why this inference
must hold in any more than trivial sense. But even if it does hold, it
is not clear how the general duty explains the particular
one; why are general obligations any more explanatory than particular
ones? Certainly anyone who is puzzled as to why there is this
particular obligation, say to rescue one’s wife, is unlikely to
find it very illuminating to be pointed towards the general obligation
of which it is meant to be an instance. (Williams’ closeness to
certain particularist strategies should be obvious here: cp. Dancy
2004, and Chappell 2005.)

Another inappropriate commitment arising from the obligation
out-obligation in principle, famously spelled out at 1981: 18, is
the agent’s commitment to a “thought too many”. If
an agent is in a situation where he has to choose which of two people
to rescue from some catastrophe, and chooses the one of the two people
who is his wife, then “it might have been hoped by some people
(for instance, by his wife) that his motivating thought, fully spelled
out, would be the thought that it was his wife, not that it was his
wife and that in situations of this kind it is permissible to save
one’s wife.” The morality system, Williams is suggesting,
makes nonsense of the agent’s action in rescuing his wife: its
insistence on generality obscures the particular way in which this
action is really justified for the agent. Its real justification has
nothing to do with the impersonal and impartial standards of morality,
and everything to do with the place in the agent’s life of the
person he chooses to rescue. For Williams, the standard of “what
makes life meaningful” is always deeper and more genuinely
explanatory than the canon of moral obligation; the point is central,
and we shall come back to it below in sections 3 and 4.

Williams’ opposition to the fourth thesis,
about the inescapability of morality, rests on the closely-related
contrast he draws between moral considerations, and considerations
about “importance”: “ethical life is important, but
it can see that things other than itself are important” (1985:
184). This notion of importance is grounded, ultimately, in the fact
“that each person has a life to lead” (1985: 186). What is
important, in this sense, is whatever humans need to make it possible
to lead what can reasonably be recognised as meaningful lives; the
notion of importance is of ethical use because, and insofar as, it
reflects the facts about “what we can understand men as needing
and wanting” (1972: 95). The notion that moral obligation is
inescapable is undermined by careful attention to this concept of
importance, simply because reflection shows that the notion of moral
obligation will have to be grounded in the notion of importance if it
is to be grounded in anything that is not simply illusory. But if it
is grounded in that, then it cannot itself be the only thing that
matters. Hence moral obligation cannot be inescapable, which refutes
the fourth thesis of the morality system; other
considerations can sometimes override or trump an obligation without
themselves being obligations, which refutes the
fifth; and there can be no point in trying to
represent every practically important consideration as a moral
obligation, so that it is for instance a distortion for Ross (The
Right and The Good, 21 ff.) to talk of “duties of
gratitude” (1985: 181); which refutes the
sixth.

One vivid instance of the escapability of moral obligations is
Williams’ own example of “Gauguin”, a
(fictionalised) artist who deliberately rejects a whole host of moral
obligations (to his family, for instance) because he finds it more
“important”, in this sense, to be a painter. As Williams
comments (1981: 23), “While we are sometimes guided by the
notion that it would be the best of worlds in which morality were
universally respected and all men were of a disposition to affirm it,
we have, in fact, deep and persistent reasons to be grateful that that
is not the world we have”; in other words, moral obligation is
escapable because it is not in the deepest human interest that it
should be inescapable. (“Because”: the fact that this sort
of inference is possible in ethics is itself a revealing fact about
the nature of ethics.)

Williams’ Gauguin example, we have suggested, has force against
the thesis that morality is inescapable. It also has force against the
seventh thesis of the morality system, its insistence
on “purity” and its denial of what Williams calls
“moral luck”. To understand this notion, begin with the
familiar legal facts that attempted murder is a different and less
grave offence than murder, and that dangerous driving typically does
not attract the same legal penalty if no one is actually hurt.
Inhabitants of the morality system will characteristically be puzzled
by this distinction. How can it be right to assign different levels of
blame, and different punishments, to two agents whose mensrea was exactly the same—it was just that one would-be
murderer dropped the knife and the other didn’t—or to two
equally reckless motorists—one of whom just happened to miss the
pedestrians while the other just happened to hit them?

One traditional answer—much favoured by the
utilitarians—is that these sorts of thoughts only go to show
that the point of blame and punishment is prospective
(deterrence-based), not retrospective (desert-based). There are
reasons for thinking that blame and punishment cannot be made sense of
in this instrumental fashion (cp. UFA: 124, 1985: 178). “From
the inside”, both notions seem essentially retrospective, so
that if a correct understanding of them said that they were really
fictions serving a prospective social function, no one who knew that
could continue to use these notions “from the inside”:
that is, the notions would have proved unstable under reflection for
this person, who would thereby have lost some ethical knowledge. If
this gambit fails, another answer—favoured by Kantians, but
available to utilitarians too—is that the law would need to
engage in an impossible degree of mind-reading to pick up all and only
those cases of mens rea that deserve punishment irrespective
of the outcomes. Even if this is the right thing to say about the law,
the answer cannot be transposed to the case of morality: morality
contrasts with the law precisely because it is supposed to apply even
to the inner workings of the mind. Thus, morality presumably ought to
be just as severe on the attempted murderer and the reckless but lucky
motorist as it is on their less fortunate doubles.

Williams has a different answer to the puzzle why we blame people more
when they are successful murderers, or not only reckless but lethal
motorists, despite the fact that they have no voluntary control over
their success as murderers or their lethality as motorists. His answer
is that—despite what the morality system tells us—our
practice of blame is not in fact tied exclusively to voluntary
control. We blame people not only for what they have
voluntarily done, but also for what they have done as a
matter of luck: we might also say, of their moral luck.
The way we mostly think about these matters often does not distinguish
these two elements of control and luck at all clearly—as is also
witnessed by the important possibility of blaming people for what they
are. These phenomena, Williams argues, help to reveal the
basic unclarity of our notion of the voluntary; they also help to show
how “what we think” about blame is not always the same as
“what we think we think”.

Parallel points apply with praise. Someone like the Gauguin of
Williams’ story can be seen as taking a choice of the demands of
art over the obligations of family life which will be praiseworthy or
blameworthy depending on how it turns out (“The only
thing that will justify his choice will be success itself”,
1981: 23). Here success or failure is quite beyond Gauguin’s
voluntary control, and thus, if the morality system were right, would
have to be beyond the scope of praise and blame as well. A fault-line
in our notions of praise and blame is revealed by the fact that,
intuitively, it is not: the case where Gauguin tries and fails to be
an artist is one where we condemn him “for making such a mess of
his and others’ lives”, the case where he tries and
succeeds is, very likely, one where we say, a little grudgingly
perhaps, “Well, all right then — well done.” We have
the morality system’s narrow or “pure” versions of
these notions, in which they apply only to (a narrow or
“pure” version of) the voluntary; but we also have a wider
version of the notions of praise and blame, in which they also apply
to many things that are not voluntary on any account of the voluntary.
Williams’ thesis about moral luck is that the wider notions are
more useful, and truer to experience. (For a sustained defense of
Williams on these basic points, see Joseph Raz “Agency and
Luck”)

Nor is it only praise and blame that are in this way less tightly
connected to conditions about voluntariness than the morality system
makes them seem. Beyond the notion of blame lie other, equally
ethically important, notions such as regret or even anguish at
one’s actions; and these notions need not show any tight
connection with voluntariness either. As we saw in my shipwreck
example above, the mere fact that it was unreasonable to expect the
ship’s officer to do much better than he did in his desperate
circumstances does not make it reasonable to fob off his anguish with
“Don’t give it a second thought”. Likewise, to use
an example of Williams’ own (1981: 28), if you were talking to a
driver who through no fault of his own had run over a child, there
would be something remarkably obtuse—something irrelevant and
superficial, even if correct—about telling him that he
shouldn’t feel bad about it provided it wasn’t
his fault. As the Greeks knew, such terrible happenings will leave
their mark, their miasma, on the agent. “The whole of
the Oedipus Tyrannus, that dreadful machine, moves towards
the discovery of just one thing, that he did it. Do we
understand the terror of that discovery only because we residually
share magical beliefs in blood-guilt, or archaic notions of
responsibility? Certainly not: we understand it because we know that
in the story of one’s life there is an authority exercised by
what one has done, and not merely by what one has intentionally
done” (1993: 69).

This sums up Williams’ case for thinking that the wider notion
of praise and blame is tenable in a way that the narrower notion is
not because of its dependence on a questionably “pure”
account of the voluntary (1985: 194; cp. MSH Essays 1–3). In
this way, he controverts the eighth thesis of the
morality system, its insistence on the centrality of blame; which was
the last thesis that we listed apart from impersonality, the
discussion of which we have postponed till the next section.

So much on Williams’ critique of the “morality
system”. How far our discussion has delivered on its promise to
show how Williams’ positive views emerge from his negative
programmes of argument, we leave, for now, to the reader’s
judgement: we shall say something more to bring the threads together
in section 5. Before that, we turn to Williams’ critique of
utilitarianism, the view that actions, rules, dispositions, motives,
social structures, (…etc.: different versions of utilitarianism
feature, or stress, some or all of these things) are to be chosen if
and only if they maximally promote utility or well-being.

4. “The day cannot be too far off…”: Williams against utilitarianism

[T]he important issues that utilitarianism raises should be discussed
in contexts more rewarding than that of utilitarianism itself…
the day cannot be too far off in which we hear no more of it (UFA:
150).[18]

Williams opposes utilitarianism partly for the straightforward reason
that it is an
“ism”,[19]
a systematisation—often a deliberately brisk or indeed
“simple-minded” one (UFA: 149)—of our ethical
thinking. As we have already seen, he believes that ethical thinking
cannot be systematised without intolerable distortions and losses,
because to systematise is, inevitably, to streamline our ethical
thinking in a reductionist style: “Theory typically uses the
assumption that we probably have too many ethical ideas, some of which
may well turn out to be mere prejudices. Our major problem now is
actually that we have not too many but too few, and we need to cherish
as many as we can” (1985: 117). Again, as a normative system,
utilitarianism is inevitably a systematisation of our responses, a way
of telling us how we should feel or react. As such it faces
the same basic and (for Williams) unanswerable question as any other
such systematisation, “by what right does it legislate
to the moral sentiments?” (1981: x).

Of course, Williams also opposes utilitarianism because of the
particular kind of systematisation that it is—namely, a
manifestation of the morality system. Pretty well everything said in
sections 2 and 3 against morality in general can be more tightly focused to
yield an objection to utilitarianism in particular, and sometimes this
is all we will need to bear in mind to understand some specific
objection to utilitarianism that Williams offers. Thus, for instance,
utilitarianism in its classic form is bound to face the objections
that face any moral system that ultimately is committed to denying the
possibility of real moral conflict or dilemma, and the rationality of
agent-regret. Given its insistence on generality, it faces the
“one thought too many” objection as well, at least in any
version that keeps criterion of rightness and decision procedure in
communication with each other.

Above all, utilitarianism is in trouble, according to Williams,
because of the central theoretical place that it gives to the ninth
thesis of the morality system—the thesis that we put on one side
earlier, about impersonality. Other forms of the morality system are
impersonal too, of course, notably Kantianism: “if Kantianism
abstracts in moral thought from the identity of
persons,[20]
utilitarianism strikingly abstracts from their separateness”
(1981: 3). Like Kantianism, but on a different theoretical basis,
utilitarianism abstracts from the question of who acts well,
which for utilitarianism means “who produces good
consequences?”. It is concerned only that good consequences be
produced, but it does not offer a tightly-defined account of what it
is for anything to be a consequence. Or rather it does offer an
account, but on this account the notion of a consequence is so loosely
defined as to be all-inclusive (1971: 93–94):

Consequentialism is basically indifferent to whether a state of
affairs consists in what I do, or is produced by what I do, where that
notion is itself wide… All that consequentialism is interested
in is the idea of these doings being consequences of what I
do, and that is an idea broad enough to include [many sorts of]
relations.

This explains why consequentialism has the strong doctrine of negative
responsibility that leads it to what Williams regards as its
fundamental absurdity. Because, for the utilitarian, it can’t
matter in itself whether (say) a given death is a result of what I do
in that I pull the trigger, or a result of what I do in that I refuse
to lie to the gunman who is looking for the person who dies, doing and
allowing must be morally on a par for the utilitarian, as also must
intending and foreseeing. Williams himself is not particularly
impressed by those venerable
distinctions;[21]
but he does think that there is a real and crucial distinction that
is closely related to them, and that it is a central objection to
utilitarianism that it ignores this distinction. The distinction in
question, which utilitarian ignores by being impersonal, is the
distinction between my agency and other people’s. It is this
distinction, and its fundamental moral importance, that lies at the
heart of Williams’ famous (but often misunderstood)
“integrity objection”.

In a slogan, the integrity objection is this: agency is always
some particular person’s agency; or to put it another
way, there is no such thing as impartial agency, in the sense of
impartiality that utilitarianism requires. The objection is that
utilitarianism neglects the fact that “practical deliberation
[unlike epistemic deliberation] is in every case first-personal, and
the first person is not derivative or naturally replaced by [the
impersonal] anyone” (1985: 68). Hence we are not
“agents of the universal satisfaction system”, nor indeed
primarily “janitors of any system of values, even our own”
(UFA: 118). No agent can be expected to be what a utilitarian agent
has to be—someone whose decisions “are a function of all
the satisfactions which he can affect from where he is” (UFA:
115); no agent can be required, as all are required by utilitarianism,
to abandon his own particular life and projects for the
“impartial point of view” or “the point of view of
morality”, and do all his decision-making, including (if it
proves appropriate) a decision to give a lot of weight to his own life
and projects, exclusively from there. As Williams famously puts it
(UFA: 116–117):

The point is that [the agent] is identified with his actions as
flowing from projects or attitudes which… he takes seriously at
the deepest level, as what his life is about… It is absurd to
demand of such a man, when the sums come in from the utility network
which the projects of others have in part determined, that he should
just step aside from his own project and decision and acknowledge the
decision which utilitarian calculation requires. It is to alienate him
in a real sense from his actions and the source of his action in his
own convictions. It is to make him into a channel between the input of
everyone’s projects, including his own, and an output of
optimific decision; but this is to neglect the extent to which
his projects and his decisions have to be seen as
the actions and decisions which flow from the projects and attitudes
with which he is most closely identified. It is thus, in the most
literal sense, an attack on his integrity.

Here, Williams’ commitment to the importance of subjective
authenticity is on full display. “The most literal sense”
of “integrity” is, according to Chambers’ Dictionary
(1977 edition), “entireness, wholeness: the unimpaired state of
anything”; then “uprightness, honesty, purity”. For
our purposes the latter three senses in this dictionary entry should
be ignored. It is the first three that are relevant to Williams’
argument; the word’s historical origin in the Latin
in-teger, meaning what is not touched, taken away from, or
interfered with, is also revealing.

An agent’s integrity, in Williams’ sense, is his ability
to originate actions, to further his own initiatives, purposes or
concerns, and thus to be something more than a conduit for the
furtherance of others’ initiatives, purposes or
concerns—including, for example and in particular, those which
go with the impartial view. Moreover, integrity is an essential
component of character, since, for Williams, an agent’s
character is identical to their set of deep projects and commitments.
Williams’ point, then, is that unless any particular agents are
allowed to initiate actions and to have “ground projects”,
then either the agents under this prohibition will be subjects for
manipulation by other agents who are allowed to have ground
projects—the situation of ideological oppression. Or else, if
every agent lies under this prohibition and all agents are made to
align themselves only with the ground projects of “the impartial
point of view”, there will not be any agents. To put it
another way, all will be ideologically oppressed, but by the ideology
itself rather than by another agent or group of agents who impose this
ideology. For all agents will then have lost their integrity, in the
sense that no single agent will be an unimpaired and individual whole
with projects of his own that he might identify himself with; all
agents will have to abandon all “ground projects” except
the single project that utilitarianism gives them, that of maximising
utility by whatever means looks most efficient, and to order all their
doings around no other initiatives except those that flow from this
single project. What we previously thought of as individual agents
will be subsumed as parts of a single super-agent—the
utilitarian collective, if you like—which will pursue the ends
of impartial morality without any special regard for the persons who
compose it, and which is better understood as a single super-agent
than as a group of separate agents who cooperate; rather like a swarm
of bees or a nest of ants.

It is important not to misunderstand this argument. One important
misunderstanding can arise fairly naturally from Williams’ two
famous examples (UFA: 97–99) of “Jim”, who is told
by utilitarianism to murder one Amazon villager to prevent twenty
being murdered, and “George”, who is told by
utilitarianism to take a job making weapons of mass destruction, since
the balance-sheet of utilities shows that if George refuses, George
and his family will suffer poverty and someone else—who will do
more harm than George—will take the job anyway. It is easy to
think that these stories are simply another round in the familiar game
of rebutting utilitarianism by counter-examples, and hence that
Williams’ integrity objection boils down to the straightforward
inference (1) utilitarianism tells Jim to do X and George to do Y, (2)
but X and Y are wrong (perhaps because they violate integrity?), so
(3) utilitarianism is false. But this cannot be Williams’
argument, because in fact Williams denies (2). Not only does he not
claim that utilitarianism tells both Jim and George to do the wrong
things. He even suggests, albeit rather grudgingly, that
utilitarianism tells Jim (at least) to do the right thing. (UFA: 117:
“…if (as I suppose) the utilitarian is right in this
case…”) Counter-examples, then, are not the point:
“If the stories of George and Jim have a resonance, it is not
the sound of a principle being dented by an intuition” (WME
211). The real point, he tells us, is not “just a question of
the rightness or obviousness of these answers”; “It is
also a question of what sort of considerations come into finding the
answer” (UFA: 99). “Over all this, or round it, and
certainly at the end of it, there should have been heard ‘what
do you think?’, ‘does it seem like that to you?’,
‘what if anything do you want to do with the notion of
integrity?’” (WME 211).

Again, despite Williams’ interest in the moral category of
“the unthinkable” (UFA: 92–93; cp. MSH Essay 4), it
is not Williams’ claim that either Jim or George, if they are
(in the familiar phrase) “men of integrity”, are bound to
find it literally unthinkable to work in WMD or to shoot a villager,
or will regard these actions as the sort of things that come under the
ban of some absolute prohibition that holds (in Anscombe’s
famous phrase) whatever the consequences: “this is a
much stronger position than any involved, as I have defined the
issues, in the denial of consequentialism… It is perfectly
consistent, and it might be thought a mark of sense, to believe, while
not being a consequentialist, that there was no type of action which
satisfied [the conditions for counting as morally prohibited no matter
what]” (UFA:
90).[22]

Nor therefore, to pick up a third misunderstanding of the integrity
objection, is Williams offering an argument in praise of “the
moral virtue of integrity”, where “integrity”
is—in jejune forms of this misreading—the virtue of doing
the right thing not the wrong thing, or—in more sophisticated
forms—a kind of honesty about what one’s values really are
and a firm refusal to compromise those values by hypocrisy or
cowardice (usually, with the implication that one has hold of the
right values). An agent can be told by utilitarianism to do something
terrible in order to avoid something even worse, as Jim and George
are. Williams is not opposing this sort of utilitarian
conclusion by arguing that the value of “integrity” in the
sense of the word that he anyway does not have in mind—the
personal quality—is something else that has to be put into the
utilitarian balance-sheet, and that when you put it in, the
utilitarian verdict comes out differently. Nor is Williams saying,
even, that the value of integrity in the sense of the word that he
does have in mind—roughly, allowing agents to be
agents—is something else that has to be put into the utilitarian
balance-sheet, as it is characteristically put in by indirect
utilitarians such as Peter Railton and Amartya Sen: “The point
here is not, as utilitarians may hasten to say, that if the project or
attitude is that central to his life, then to abandon it will be very
disagreeable to him and great loss of utility will be involved. I
have already argued in section 4 that it is not like that; on the
contrary, once he is prepared to look at it like that, the argument in
any serious case is over anyway” (UFA: 116). Williams’
point is rather that the whole business of compiling balance-sheets of
the utilitarian sort is incompatible with the phenomenon of agency as
we know it: “the reason why utilitarianism cannot understand
integrity is that it cannot coherently describe the relations between
a man’s projects and his actions” (UFA: 100). As soon as
we take up the viewpoint which aims at nothing but the overall
maximisation of utility, and which sees agents as no more than nodes
in the causal network that is to be manipulated to produce this
consequence, we have lost sight of the very idea of agency.

And why should it matter if we lose sight of that? To say it again,
the point of the integrity objection is not that the world will be a
better place if we don’t lose sight of the very idea of agency
(though Williams thinks this as
well[23]).
The point is rather that a world-view that has lost sight of the real
nature of agency, as the utilitarian world-view has, simply does
not make sense: as Williams puts it in the quotation above, it is
“absurd”.

Why is it absurd? Because the view involves deserting one’s
position in the universe for “what Sidgwick, in a memorably
absurd phrase, called ‘the point of view of the
universe’” (1981:
xi).[24]
That this is what utilitarianism’s impartial view ultimately
requires is argued by Williams in his discussion of Sidgwick at MSH
169–170:

The model is that I, as theorist, can occupy, if only temporarily and
imperfectly, the point of view of the universe, and see everything
from the outside, including myself and whatever moral or other
dispositions, affections or projects, I may have; and from that
outside view, I can assign to them a value. The difficulty is…
that the moral dispositions… cannot simply be regarded, least
of all by their possessor, just as devices for generating actions or
states of affairs. Such dispositions and commitments will
characteristically be what gives one’s life some meaning, and
gives one some reason for living it… there is simply no
conceivable exercise that consists in stepping completely outside
myself and from that point of view evaluating in toto the
dispositions, projects, and affections that constitute the substance
of my own life… It cannot be a reasonable aim that I or any
other particular person should take as the ideal view of the
world… a view from no point of view at all.

As Williams also put it, “Philosophers… repeatedly urge
one to view the world sub specie aeternitatis; but for most
human purposes”—science is the biggest exception, in
Williams’ view—“that is not a very good
species to view it under” (UFA: 118). The utilitarian
injunction to see things from the impartial standpoint is, if it means
anything, an injunction to adopt the “absolute conception”
of the world (1978: 65–67). But even if such a conception were
available—and Williams argues repeatedly that it is not
available for ethics, even if it is for science (1985
Ch.8)—there is no reason to think that the absolute conception
could provide me with the best of all possible viewpoints for ethical
thinking. There isn’t even reason to think that it can provide
me with a better viewpoint than the viewpoint of my own life. That
latter viewpoint does after all have the pre-eminent advantage of
being mine, and the one that I already occupy anyway (indeed cannot
but occupy). “My life, my action, is quite irreducibly mine, and
to require that it is at best a derivative conclusion that it
should be lived from the perspective that happens to be mine is an
extraordinary misunderstanding” (MSH 170).

(Notice that Williams is also making the point here that there is no
sense in the indirect-utilitarian supposition that my living my life
from my own perspective is something that can be given a philosophical
vindication from the impartial perspective, and can then reasonably be
regarded (by me or anyone else) as justified. Williams sees an
incoherence at the very heart of the project of indirect
utilitarianism, because he does not believe that the ambition to
justify one’s life “from the outside” in the
utilitarian fashion can be coherently combined with the ambition to
live that life “from the
inside”.[25]
The kind of factors that make a life make sense are so different from
the kind of factors that utilitarianism is structurally obliged to
prize that we have every reason to hope that people will not think in
the utilitarian way. In other words, it will be best even from the
utilitarian point of view if no one is actually a utilitarian; which
means that, at best, “utilitarianism’s fate is to usher
itself from the scene” (UFA: 134).) While some utilitarians have
claimed to be unfazed by this result—it does not imply the
falsity of utilitarianism qua theory of right
action—the fact that they continue to publish books and articles
defending utilitarianism suggests that they do not really wish for the
theory to play no direct role in our moral deliberations.

On the issue of impartiality, it will no doubt be objected that
Williams overstates his case. It seems possible to engage in the
kind of impartial thinking that is needed, not just by utilitarianism,
but by any plausible morality, without going all the way to
Sidgwick’s very peculiar notion of “the point of view of
the universe”. When ordinary people ask, as they always have
asked, the question “How would you like it?”, or
when Robert Burns utters his famous optative “O wad some
pow’r the giftie gie us/ To see oorselves as ithers see
us”,[26]
it does not (to put it mildly) make best sense of what they are
saying to attribute to them a faithful commitment to the theoretical
extravagances of a high-minded Victorian moralist. Can’t
morality find a commonsense notion of impartiality that
doesn’t involve the point of view of the universe?
Indeed, if Williams’ own views about impartiality are plausible,
mustn’t he himself use some such notion?

To this Williams will reply, we think, that a commonsense notion of
impartiality is indeed available—to us, though not to moral
theory. The place of commonsense impartiality in our ordinary ethical
thought is utterly different from the theoretical role of
utilitarianism’s notion of impartiality. The commonsense notion
of impartiality is not, unlike the utilitarian notion, a lowest common
theoretical denominator for notions of rightness, by reference to
which all other notions of rightness are to be understood. Rather,
commonsense impartiality is one ethical resource among
others. (Cp. the quotation above from 1985: 117 about avoiding
sparseness and reduction in our ethical thinking, and
“cherishing as many ethical ideas as we can”.) Moreover,
and crucially, Williams’ acceptance of “methodological
intuitionism” (see MSH essay 15) commits him to saying that the
relation of the commonsense notion of impartiality to other ethical
resources or considerations is essentially indeterminate: “It
may be obvious that in general one sort of consideration is more
important than another… but it is a matter of judgement whether
in a particular case that priority is preserved: other factors alter
the balance, or it may be a very weak example of the kind of
consideration that generally wins… there is no reason to
believe that there is one currency in terms of which all relations of
comparative importance can be represented” (MSH 190). The
indeterminacy of the relations between commonsense impartiality and
other ethical considerations means that commonsense impartiality
resists the kind of systematisation that moral theory demands. Hence,
there is indeed a notion of impartiality that makes sense, and there
is indeed a notion of impartiality that is available to a moral theory
such as utilitarianism; but the impartiality that is available to
utilitarianism does not make sense, and the impartiality that makes
sense is not available to utilitarianism.

Williams argues, then, that the utilitarian world-view is absurd
because it requires agents to be impartial, not merely in the weak and
everyday sense that they take impartiality to be one ethical
consideration among an unsystematic collection of other considerations
that they (rightly) recognise, but in the much stronger, reductive and
systematising, sense that they adopt the absolute impartiality of
Sidgwick’s “point of view of the universe”.

We can also say something that sounds quite different, but which in
the end is at least a closely related point. We can say that Williams
takes the utilitarian world-view to be absurd, because it requires
agents to act on external reasons. I turn to that way of putting the
point in section 5.

5. Internal and external reasons

In his famous paper “Internal and external reasons” (1981:
101–113) Williams presents what I’ll call “the
internal reasons thesis”: the claim that all reasons are
internal, and that there are no external reasons.

The internal reasons thesis is a view about how to read sentences of
the form “A has reason to φ”. We can read such
sentences as implying that “A has some motive which will be
served or furthered by his φing” (1981: 101), so that, if
there is no such motive, it will not be true that “A has reason
to φ”. This is the internal interpretation of such
sentences. We can also read sentences of the form “A has reason
to φ” as not implying this, but as saying that A has reason
to φ even if none of his motives will be served or furthered by
his φing. This is the external interpretation of such
sentences, on which, according to Williams, all such sentences are
false.

Since he is widely misinterpreted on this point, it is important
to see that Williams is only offering a necessary condition
for the truth of sentences of the form “A has reason to
φ”. He is not (officially) committed to the stronger claim,
that the presence of some motive which is served or furthered by
φing is sufficient for the possession of a reason to
φ. Officially, then, Williams is not defining or fully analyzing
the concept of a reason; rather, the necessary condition itself
represents a threat. (We say "officially" because there are
indications that Williams unofficially held a stronger view; see the
final paragraphs in this piece for elaboration.)

Very roughly, then, the basic idea of Williams’ internal reasons
thesis is that we cannot have genuine reasons to act that have no
connection whatever with anything that we care about. His positive
defense of the thesis can be roughly stated as follows: since it must
be possible for an agent to act for a reason, reasons must be
capable of explaining actions. This argument, it should be
noted, brings together a normative and a descriptive concept in a
robustly naturalistic manner. The notion of a reason, he argues, is
inextricably bound up with the notion of explanation. Absent a motive which can be furthered by some action, it
seems impossible for an agent to actually perform the action except
under conditions of false information. If an external reason is one
that is supposed to obtain in the absence of the relevant motive even
under conditions of full information, then external reasons can never
explain actions, and hence cannot be reasons at all (1981: 107).

This thesis presents a challenge to certain natural and traditional
ways of thinking about ethics. When we tell someone that he should not
rob bank-vaults or murder bank-clerks, we usually understand ourselves
to be telling him that he has reason not to rob bank-vaults
or murder bank-clerks. If the internal reasons thesis is true, then
the bank-robber can prove that he has no such reason simply by showing
that he doesn’t care about anything that is achieved by
abstaining from bank-robbing. So we seem to reach the disturbing
conclusion that morality’s rules are like the rules of some
sport or parlour-game—they apply only to those who choose to
join in by obeying them.

One easy way out of this is to distinguish between moral
demands and moral reasons. If all reasons to act are
internal reasons, then it certainly seems that the bank-robber has no
reason not to rob banks. It doesn’t follow that the
bank-robber is not subject to a moral demand not to rob
banks. If (as we naturally assume) there is no opting out of obeying
the rules of morality, then everyone will be subject to that moral
demand, including the bank-robber. In that case, however, this moral
demand will not be grounded on a reason that applies
universally—to everyone, and hence even to the bank-robber. At
most it will be grounded in the reasons that some of us have,
to want there to be no bank-robbing, and in the thought that it would
be nice if people like the bank-robber were to give more general
recognition to the presence of that sort of reason in
others—were, indeed, to add it to their own repertoire of
reasons.

If we take this way out, then the moral demand not to rob banks will
turn out to be grounded not on universally-applicable moral reasons,
but on something more like Humean empathy. Williams himself thinks
that this is, in general, a much better way to ground moral demands
than the appeal to reasons (“Having sympathetic concern for
others is a necessary condition of being in the world of
morality”, 1972: 26; cp. 1981: 122, 1985 Ch.2). In this he
stands outside the venerable tradition of rationalism in ethics, which
insists that if moral demands cannot be founded on moral
reasons, then there is something fundamentally suspect about morality
itself. It is this tradition that is threatened by the internal
reasons thesis.

Of course, we might wonder how significant the threat really is. As we
paraphrased it, the internal reasons thesis says that “we cannot
have genuine reasons to act that have no connection whatever with
anything that we care about”. Let us take up this notion of
“connections”. As Williams stresses, the internal reasons
thesis is not the view that, unless I actually have a given
motive M, I cannot have an internal reason corresponding to
M.[27]
The view is rather that I will have no internal reason unless either
(a) I actually have a given motivation M in my
“subjective motivational set” (“my S”: 1981:
102), or (b) I could come to have M by following “a
sound deliberative route” (MSH 35) from the beliefs and
motivations that I do actually have—that is, a way of reasoning
that builds conservatively on what I already believe and care about.
So, to cite Williams’ own example (1981: 102), the internal
reasons thesis is not falsified by the case of someone who is
motivated to drink gin and believes that this is gin, hence is
motivated to drink this—where “this” is in fact
petrol. We are not obliged to say, absurdly, that this person has a
genuine internal reason to drink petrol, nor to say, in contradiction
of the internal reasons thesis, that this person has a genuine
external reason not to drink what is in front of him. Rather we should
note the fact that, even though he is not actually motivated not to
drink the petrol, he would be motivated not to drink it
if he realised that it was petrol. He can get to the
motivation not to drink it by a sound deliberative route from where he
already is; hence, by (b), he has an internal reason not to drink the
petrol.

It is this notion of “sound deliberative routes” that
prompts the question, how big a threat the internal reasons thesis
really is to ethical rationalism. Going back to the bank-robber, we
might point out how very unlikely it is to be true that he
doesn’t care about anything that is achieved by not
robbing banks, or lost by robbing them. Doesn’t the bank-robber
want, like anyone else, to be part of society? Doesn’t he want,
like anyone else, the love and admiration of others? If he has either
of these motivations, or any of a galaxy of other similar ones, then
there will very probably be a sound deliberative route from the
motivations that the bank-robber actually has, to the conclusion that
even he should be motivated not to rob banks; hence, that even he has
internal reason not to rob banks. But then, of course, it seems likely
that we can extend and generalise this pattern of argument, and
thereby show that just about anyone has the reasons that (a sensible)
morality says they have. For just about anyone will have internal
reason to do all the things that morality says they should do,
provided only that they have any of the kind of social and extroverted
motivations that we located in the bank-robber, and used to ground his
internal reason not to rob banks. Hence, we might conclude, the
internal reasons thesis is no threat either to traditional ethical
rationalism, nor indeed to traditional morality—not at least
once this is shorn by critical reflection of various excrescences that
really are unreasonable.

This line of thought does echo a pattern of argument that is found in
many ethicists, from Plato’s Republic to Philippa
Foot’s “Moral Beliefs”. However, it does not ward
off the threat to ethical rationalism. The threat still lurks in the
“if”. We have suggested that the bank-robber will have
internal reason not to rob banks, if he shares in certain
normal human social motivations. But what if he doesn’t
share in these? The problem is not merely that, if he doesn’t,
then we won’t know what to say to him. The problem is that the
applicability of moral reasons is still conditional on people’s
actual motivations, and local to those people who have the right
motivations. But it seems to be a central thought about moral reasons,
as they have traditionally been understood, that they should be
unconditionally and universally overriding: that it
should not be possible even in principle for any rational agent to
stand outside their reach, or to elude them simply by saying
“Sorry, but I just don’t care about
morality”. On the present line of thought, this possibility
remains open; and so the internal reasons thesis remains a threat to
ethical rationalism.

One way of responding to this continuing threat is to find an argument
for saying that every agent has, at least fundamentally, the same
motivations: hence moral reasons, being built upon these motivations,
are indeed unconditionally and universally overriding, as the ethical
rationalist hoped to show. One way of doing this is the
Thomist-Aristotelian way, which grounds the universality of our
motivations in our shared nature as human beings, and in certain
claims which are taken to be essentially true about humans just as
such.[28]
Another is the Kantian way, which grounds the universality of our
motivations in our shared nature as agents, and in certain claims
which are taken to be essentially true about agents just as such.

It is interesting to note that this sort of ethical-rationalist
response to the internal reasons thesis can seem to undercut
Williams’ distinction between external and internal reasons. For
the
Thomist/neo-Aristotelian[29]
or the Kantian, the point is not that we can truly say, with the
external reasons theorist, that an agent has some reasons that bear no
relation at all to the motivations in his present S
(subjective motivational set), or even to those motivations he might
come, by some sound deliberative route, to derive from his present
S. The point is rather that there are some motivations which
are derivable from any S
whatever.[30]
Williams himself recognises this point in the case of Kant (WME 220,
note 3): “Kant thought that a person would recognise the demands
of morality if he or she deliberated correctly from his or her
existing S, whatever that S might be, but he thought
this because he took those demands to be implicit in a conception of
practical reason which he could show to apply to any rational
deliberator as such. I think that it best preserves the point of
the internalism/ externalism distinction to see this as a limiting
case of
internalism.”[31]

So for the Kantian and the neo-Aristotelian or Thomist, there are
motivations which appear to ground internal reasons only, since the
reasons that they ground are always genuinely related to whatever the
agent actually cares about. On the other hand, these motivations also
appear to ground reasons which have exactly the key features that the
ethical rationalist wanted to find in external reasons. Two in
particular: first, these reasons are unconditional, because
they depend on features of the human being (Aquinas) or the agent
(Kant) which are essential features—it is a necessary
truth that these features are present; and second, these reasons are
universal, because they depend on ubiquitous
features—features which are present in every human or
agent. So Williams’ response to the neo-Aristotelian or the
Kantian view of practical reason had better not be (and indeed is not)
simply to invoke his internal reasons thesis. As he realises, he also
needs to argue that there can’t be reasons of the kinds that the
neo-Aristotelian and the Kantian posit: reasons which are genuinely
unconditional, but also genuinely related to each and every
agent’s actual motivations. Whatever else may be wrong with the
neo-Aristotelian and Kantian theories of practical reason, it
won’t be simply that they invoke external reasons; for it is
fairly clear that they don’t (the contemporary Kantian
philosopher who has most effectively pushed this point is Christine
Korsgaard, see her Sources of Normativity, 1996).

If not even Kant counts as an external reasons theorist, who does?
That is a natural question at this point, since it is probably Kant
who is usually taken to be the main target of Williams’ argument
against external reasons. This assumption is perhaps based on the
evidence of 1981: 106, where (despite the points we have already noted
about Kant’s theory which Williams recognised at least by 1995)
Williams certainly attributes to Kant the view that there can be
“an ‘ought’ which applies to an agent independently
of what the agent happens to want”. Even here, however, Williams
is actually rather cagey about saying that Kant is an external reasons
theorist: he tells us that the question ‘What is the status of
external reasons claims?’ is “not the same question as
that of the status of a supposed categorical imperative”;
“or rather, it is not undoubtedly the same question”,
since the relation between oughts and reasons is a difficult issue,
and anyway there are certainly external reasons claims which are not
moral claims at all, such as Williams’ own example of Owen
Wingrave’s family’s pressure on him to follow his father
and grandfather into the army (1981: 106).

In any case, it is important to see that there do not have to be
any examples of philosophers who clear-headedly and
definitely espouse an external reasons theory. The point is rather
that no one could be a clear-headed and definite external reasons
theorist if Williams is right, because, in that case, the notion of
external reasons is basically unintelligible (MSH 39:
“mysterious”, “quite obscure”).
Williams’ internal reasons thesis is that it is unintelligible
to suppose that something could genuinely be a reason for me to act
which yet had no relation either to anything I care about, nor to
anything that I might, without brainwashing or other violence to my
deliberative capacities, come to care
about.[32]
If this thesis is true, then perhaps we should not expect to find any
definite examples of clear-headed external reasons theorists. It will
be no surprise if someone who tries to develop a clear-headed external
reasons theory turns out not to be definitely an external
reasons theorist: thus for example John McDowell’s theory in WME
Essay 5, even though it is explicitly presented as an example of
external reasons theory, is probably not best understood that way.
(Very quickly, this is because McDowell wants to develop an external
reasons theory as a view about moral perception, “the
acquisition of a way of seeing things” (WME 73). But
literal perception does not commit us to external reasons.
When I literally “just see” something, my visual
perception—even my well-habituated and skilful
perception—adds something to my stock of internal, not external,
reasons. If we take the perceptual analogy seriously in ethics, it is
hard to see why we can’t say the same about moral perceptions.)
Nor, conversely, will it be surprising if someone who tries to develop
what is definitely an external reasons theory turns out not to be, so
far forth, very clear-headed. Thus Peter Singer’s exhortations
to us to take up the moral point of view (see e.g. Practical
Ethics
10–11[33])
give us perhaps the most definite example available of an external
reasons theory in contemporary moral philosophy—but are also one
of the least clearly-explained or justified parts of Singer’s
position. The notion of an external reason is, basically, a confused
notion, and Williams’ fundamental aim is to expose the
confusion.[34]

The fact that there can be no clear and intelligible account of
external reasons has important consequences, consequences which go to
the heart of the morality system discussed in sections 2 and 3, and which
also relate back to the critique of utilitarianism that we saw
Williams develop in section 4. If there can be no external reasons,
then there is no possibility of saying that the same set of moral
reasons is equally applicable to all agents. (Not at least unless some
universalising system like Kantianism or neo-Aristotelianism can be
vindicated without recourse to external reasons; Williams, as
we’ve seen, rejects these systems on other grounds.) Deprived of
this possibility, we are thrown immediately into a
historicised way of doing ethics—a project with roots
in both the Hegelian and Nietzschean traditions. No absolute
conception of ethics will be available to us; hence, neither will the
kind of impartiality that utilitarianism depends upon. Agents’
reasons, and what agents’ reasons can become, will always be
relativised to their particular contexts and their particular lives;
and that fact too will be another manifestation of “moral
luck”.

Furthermore—a consequence that Williams particularly
emphasises—without external reasons, or alternatively something
like Kantianism or neo-Aristotelianism, there will be no possibility
of deploying the notion of blame in the way that the morality
system wants to deploy it. “Blame involves treating the person
who is blamed like someone who had a reason to do the right thing but
did not do it” (MSH 42). But in cases where someone had no
internal reason to do (what we take to be) the right thing
that they did not do, it was not in fact true that they had
any reason to do that thing; for internal reasons are the
only reasons. Typical cases of blaming people will, then, often have
an unsettling feature closely related to one that we noted at the
beginning of this section. They will rest on the fiction that the
people blamed had really signed up for the standards whereby they are
blamed. And so, once again, there will seem to be something optional
about adherence to the standards of morality: morality will seem to be
escapable in just the sense that the morality system denies.

Williams’ denial of the possibility of external
reasons—understood in light of his naturalism and his
anti-systematic outlook—thus underwrites and supports his views
on a whole range of other matters. And though the internal reasons
thesis too is, in an important way, a negative thesis, it is arguably
the cornerstone of a more robust, positive conception of our practical
lives. While he only defended the negative condition in print, there
is evidence that Williams actually believed that the right kind of
strong desire is a sufficient condition for the possession of a
practical reason. In Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, he
briefly opined that "desiring to do something is of course a reason
for doing it," (1985:19), and he developed a theory of practical
necessity according to which our deep commitments ("ground
projects") necessarily constrain and direct our practical rationality
(MSH 17).

Seen in this light, the internal reasons thesis is the seed out of
which most of Williams’ ethical ideas grow. At the outset of his
writing career, he took for his own “a phrase of D.H.
Lawrence’s in his splendid commentary on the complacent moral
utterances of Benjamin Franklin: ‘Find your deepest impulse, and
follow that’” (1972: 93). Thirty years later he added,
when looking back over his career, “If there’s one theme
in all my work it’s about authenticity and
self-expression… It’s the idea that some things are in
some real sense really you, or express what you and others
aren’t…. The whole thing has been about spelling out the
notion of inner
necessity.”[35]

Bibliography

Books and Papers by Bernard Williams

Books

These are referred to simply by year and page number (e.g.,
“1972: 2”), except where Williams published more than one
book in the same year, in which case we have used the abbreviations
indicated.

1972: Morality: An Introduction to Ethics, Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.

PS: Problems of the Self, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1973.

UFA: Utilitarianism: For and Against, with J.J.C. Smart,
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973.

1978: Descartes: The Project of Pure Inquiry, London:
Pelican.

1979: Report of the Committee on Obscenity and Film
Censorship (Chairman: Bernard Williams), Her Majesty’s
Stationery Office, reprinted by Cambridge University Press.

1981: Moral Luck, Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.

1985: Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, London:
Fontana.

1993: Shame and Necessity, Berkeley: University of
California Press.

MSH: Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1995.

“The moral view of politics”, The Listener,
June 3, 1976, 705–707. (“Nozick runs the risk of doing the same
as many Goldwaterites, of heading nostalgically for an Old West State
of nature, but doing it in a Cadillac”, p. 706.)

“Dworkin on Community and Critical Interests”,
California Law Review, 77 (1989): 515–520.